Pain and Purpose: The Self-Evident Truths Revealed by Suffering

There are certain truths which humanity cannot escape; they are ‘self-evident.’ This means that they do not need proof; any reasonable person who thinks seriously about them must accept them.

The most famous application of self-evident truths is found in the American Declaration of Independence. Its famous line reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is a curious set of so-called self-evident truths. While most Americans would readily agree to them, not everyone would. Indeed, throughout human history, many societies and peoples would object that these are not self-evident. Are all men created equal? Are peasant and prince created equal? Many ancient peoples would object. Perhaps these truths are not so ‘self-evident’ as the founders thought.

It is possible that we can find self-evident truths in another direction. By examining suffering, we can find certain truths which all people must admit. This is because of the universal nature of suffering. Since it is a universal experience, its lessons are universal and must be admitted; the lessons of suffering are ‘self-evident.’

The universality of suffering is seen in every culture – eastern and western – throughout history. Observe just a few examples:

> From the book of Job, the most ancient religious text of the Bible – “but man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)

> From the Buddha, one of the most respected religious authorities of the East -“Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering.”

> From an ancient Sumerian poem, “On the day shares were allotted to all / my allotted share was suffering.”

> The atheist philosopher Nietzche – “To live is to suffer.”

> Jordan Peterson, summarizing the history of humanity – “Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.”

In light of this universal experience of suffering, are there any self-evident truths which we may learn?

First, suffering teaches that there is objective right and wrong. Talk of moral relativism – of good and evil being only relative terms that are societally defined – is stupidity for the person who has suffered. It is impossible to say that the evil which produces suffering is neutral. When we are not the subject, but the object, of suffering – then, without any doubt, we must recognize the moral element of the world. Suffering people do not believe in moral relativism.

Second, suffering teaches that there is meaning and purpose. Suffering people believe that there is meaning in their suffering. Just as it is not morally neutral, neither is it random. Every person is inborn with sense of purpose in their sufferings. Whether Christian or atheist, religious or pagan, none of us believes that our own suffering is just ‘bad luck,’ even if we talk about it that way. We all ask the age-old questions, ‘why?’ And ‘why me?’ As Victor Frankl, survivor of the Holocaust, said, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.”

This is what we see in the ancient story of Joseph’s brothers. Faced with suffering and difficulty, they immediately drew a link to their decades-old faults – “In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.”

Third, suffering teaches that there must be a standard for good and evil. If there is objective right and wrong, then there must be a means to measure it. That measuring point, being objective, must be universal – and therefore, it is not found within the human being, but outside of him. From here, it is not hard to make the argument for God, the divine measuring line.

Indeed, this is the argument that Solomon makes in Ecclesiastes – “Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:16-17).

In other words, Solomon is saying that the reality of evil does not rule out the existence of God; on the contrary, it proves the existence of God. This is not just because we personally wish for a being who judges evildoers, but because – more significantly – we couldn’t distinguish between good and evil if there wasn’t some enforcer of morality, some dividing line by which to distinguish the one from the other.

These three truths, then, are self-evident to anyone who has suffered and taken the time to reasonably consider their own suffering.

The significance of pain, suffering, and evil is that they are powerful tools which force humans to strip away the facades of false thinking and to confront reality. Evil forces us to take a different look at the world; it forces us to ask certain existential questions, and to reconsider our own beliefs.

This is what the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, in The Oresteia, observed – “Nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know except pain.”

Or, to put it in C.S. Lewis’ words, “Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (The Problem of Pain)

“No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” (The Problem of Pain)

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